Sitting behind his desk at the regional state land office in Kalispell, Greg Poncin doesn’t quite come across as a hardened wildland firefighter.

He could pass for an accountant: clean-shaven with glasses, of average build and speaking in quiet, measured sentences punctuated by an easy laugh.

Aside from the faint smell of woodsmoke hanging in the room, there’s no obvious giveaway that he’s also one of just 16 people in the nation certified to command massive firefighting teams — often numbering over 1,000 personnel — that battle the most complex, unpredictable and dangerous wildland fires in the country.

Poncin jokes that he spent the first 18 years of his life in the Forest Service. His dad, a federal forester and also a Type 1 commander, moved the family frequently to ranger stations throughout Idaho and Western Montana, where Poncin grew up hunting, fishing, hiking and camping.

“It was such a great childhood growing up in that environment, with such a focus on the outdoors,” Poncin says. “When my brother and I were born, my father used to tell the story of how he paid the medical bills by trapping beavers on the Blackfoot.”

He graduated from the University of Montana in 1985, and like many other college students in the state, he got his first wildland fire exposure working on fire crews over the summer. He took to the work right away, drawing on his passion for the outdoors and the sense of adventure that comes with never knowing what’s going to happen next.

“When you think about it, it’s really that classic man-versus-nature story,” he said. “When you see the kind of energy that Mother Nature produces in some of these fires, it’s awe-inspiring. ... Often it’s demonized to be this destroyer, but fire has been part of the landscape for eons. It’s that ability to get out and interact with nature in her rawest form.”

Rising to the level of an elite fire team manager was the farthest thing from his mind when he started.

Poncin says he preferred working in initial attack and operations, where his duties were more focused on the day-to-day management of the people on the ground and the strategic operatives for gaining control over landscape-level blazes.

“The bigger the organization gets, the more things besides fire start to occupy your mind,” he says.

He ended up running the fire program in the state’s land management office in Kalispell, and was propelled into leadership training by an interest in learning how to more effectively help his team.

His first year as a Type 1 commander was 2009, but his team wasn’t called out that year. In 2010, the same thing happened.

Then in 2011, all hell broke loose in Arizona. More than a million acres burned in the state that summer.

“We’re kind of sitting on our fire packs, waiting and feeling anxious for two years,” he recalls. “We got called up and were initially dispatched to the Wallow Fire” in northwest Arizona.

Immediately after arriving, however, they were rerouted to the Monument Fire, which had begun burning near the Mexican border 24 hours before.

“By three o’clock that afternoon, the fire exploded in a rampage, burned 40 homes and burned our incident command post,” he said. “We were actually dropping retardant to save our tents.”

By the time it was brought under control, it had burned more than 30,000 acres along with 76 structures and four businesses in the town of Sierra Vista. Poncin remembers that fire as a defining moment, where all his prior training and experience as a wildland firefighter were put to the test, along with the ability of his management team to function.

“As difficult and challenging as that was, it was one of the best things that could have happened to us,” he says. “At that point, everyone on our team had that common bonding experience that we could share.”

Rick Moore, a state forester who works in the operations section on Poncin’s team, describes Poncin as a humble, level-headed leader who learned from the examples set by his father, Dave, and his two predecessors in the Kalispell office, Wally Bennett and Steve Frye.

“His father was a Type 1 IC and a legend in fire, quite honestly,” says Moore. “His mentor was Wally Bennett, a Vietnam veteran, and he was such a calm person. After Vietnam, nothing could shake him.”

Bennett and Frye, another longtime Type 1 commander from the region, were both mentored by Dave Poncin, who commanded a Type 1 team and finished his service in Yellowstone Park during the catastrophic wildfires of 1988 that burned a third of the park. They, in turn, would then serve as mentors for Greg Poncin.

“You think about what team leadership they provided over the years, and what big shoes they were, being that next person is a little intimidating,” Poncin says.

This summer, Moore was with Greg Poncin in Northern Idaho, where the team was managing the Clearwater Complex of fires that burned nearly 50,000 acres.

“When we lost 48 homes over there this summer. It was a bad day,” he remembers. “Firefighters don’t like to lose homes, they don’t like to see communities going through that. He maintained his composure in spite of all that chaos going on.”

Moore has worked on fire teams with Poncin for seven years and said that despite the obvious stress involved, he’s never seen him lose his temper. He says that Poncin understands his weaknesses, and surrounds himself with people that complement him.

And it would be an understatement to say Poncin is proud of his team.

“Clearly, that’s what helps me sleep at night, because I have such confidence in them that it’s actually fun to see them challenged,” he says. “When I stand up and talk to administrators, and tell them what we’re going to do, how we’re going to do it and when, and they perform flawlessly, that’s really rewarding.”

Poncin’s management style centers around service. He shies away from the spotlight, and doesn’t exactly get thrilled about the prospect of a journalist interviewing him for a profile story.

When his team is deployed to an incident, his focus remains on the agencies and public he is serving, along with the safety of his firefighters.

“Really, success has a different metric to me. [It’s] how we are providing a service to those people who have asked us to come in and help.”

At 52, Poncin isn’t shy about the fact that he looks forward to the day when he can step down from his post. He estimates that 25 percent of his time is spent managing his team and fulfilling other related duties, such as helping with the intensive, once-per-year S520 training program that certifies Type 1 incident managers.

“I’m highly committed to that, because those aren’t the types of skills and relationships that happen when smoke is in the air — they need to happen before that.”

As for the team itself, it takes no shortage of time and energy to keep the 56-person roster filled, and he’s continually working to recruit the best and brightest.

“It’s difficult to balance the demands of the job with the demands of family and my day job,” he says, adding, that if he had someone ready to step into his place, “I would probably hand over the reigns tomorrow, as much as I enjoy it.”

Those would be another set of big shoes to fill, and for Moore and some of the other team members, Poncin’s final tour will likely be theirs as well.

“He’s the only active IC I would work for,” Moore says. “I’ve made the comment before, when Greg’s done, I’m done.”

Reporter Samuel Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.